Why are pixies so large?

[Gez]

That's why there are the Petals and the Shimmerlings in the MM3. To address the lack of "Tinkerbell-like" faeries.

BTW, the Kaluta illo in the MM, showing nixie, grig and pixie, is awfully wrong on the proportions between the three sprites.

 

[Felix]

The MM picture of a Pixie makes me think of "Willow" and the brownies therin...

Rwl is the coolest mischevious 6-inch tall character in any movie!

 

[Olibarro]

Eh. "Standard" D&D is such a hodgepodge of mixed myths and decades of literature and rpg storytelling and wholly created items that I'm not bothered by little things like certain creatures not matching my personal conception of their myths.

And any GM is welcome to create their own personal cosmology in which things work the "right" way for them. My own version of this is a campaign world I created years ago where the creation myths identified six "races of man" and all the intelligent humanoids fell into one of those six races. Humans and halflings were one line, dwarves and gnomes another, all the variants of elf another, orcs and ogres together, goblinoids, and trolls. And I decided I wanted my elves to be even more Tolkeinesque--taller, stronger, etc. And my trolls more Shannara-ish. So I did. Some things moved closer to traditional myth; some things farther away... but all of it made me happy with the way my world worked.

 

[shilsen]

Actually, the gorgon as breath-petrifying bull dates back to medieval bestiaries. This gorgon is a conceptual descendent of the catoblepas. Which was actually a third-hand account of the wildebeast.

I know, but my point is that in D&D it is still labelled as "gorgon" even though the conception is very different from what the name specifically referred to in myth. The same is true for pixies in D&D.

 

[s/LaSH]

I always thought that pwetty tiny faiwies were a comparably recent idea, the Tiny People Living At The Bottom Of My Garden - probably Victorian-era. There are certainly scattered accounts of tiny individuals across folklore (although I'll have to look over my Celtics again), but I'm not certain that fairies/fey were uniformly so. In fact, plasticity and variability are the hallmarks of such populations, and I don't know whether they were hereditary.

Probably why I hate the Pwetty Faiwies so much: my accuracy stickling.

 

[Fieari]

But without tiny Pixies you can't get tiny Pictsies, aka the Wee Free Men, and any world that doesn't have fairies kicked out of fairyland for drunken debouchery is a poorer world for it. I mean, if tulips and daffodils get fairies, why not the stinging stink weed nettle? </terryprattchet>

 

[Algolei]

I always thought that pwetty tiny faiwies were a comparably recent idea, the Tiny People Living At The Bottom Of My Garden - probably Victorian-era. There are certainly scattered accounts of tiny individuals across folklore (although I'll have to look over my Celtics again), but I'm not certain that fairies/fey were uniformly so. In fact, plasticity and variability are the hallmarks of such populations, and I don't know whether they were hereditary.

Probably why I hate the Pwetty Faiwies so much: my accuracy stickling.

Hey, me too! In 25 years of DMing, I have never used a...what you said. (And I've used sylphs and ear seekers, fer cryin' out loud!)

 

[Li Shenron]

I can't say why pixies are small and grig and tiny, I don't really know how they are supposed to be... In my mental image some fairies would be very small, so they could have made them diminutive or even fine and I wouldn't have noticed the mistake.

As Shilsen, also I was surprised the first time I read the MM that "Gorgon" was a cow. In greek myth IIRC the gorgons were 3 sisters the most famous of which was Medusa, which has become a full species in D&D!

 

[Thanee]

Much like the Minotaur.

Bye
Thanee